CHRISTIAN SENSE
BY TOM SMIKOSKI
A publication devoted to making sense out of the twenty-first century.
CAN PRAYER HEAL?
By: ABCNews.com
Can Prayer Heal?
Scientists Suggest Recovery May Be the Hand of God at Work
High in the Himalayas of Nepal, Kopan Buddhist Monks are praying for a man
named "Jimmy P."
Halfway around the world, American Sufi Muslims join in. Fundamentalist
Christians add their prayers, as do Orthodox Jews at Jersualem's Western
Wall.
"Jimmy P," a heart patient at Duke University Medical Center in North
Carolina, is part of a global scientific experiment trying to find out: Does
prayer heal?
The experiment was launched by Dr. Mitch Krucoff, a cardiologist at Duke
University Medical Center.
"If in addition to all the prayer routinely going on all the time, we were
to add prayers from religious groups all over the world focused on one
individual's recovery, is there a measurable incremental benefit?" he
wondered. So he is putting prayer to the test in a global scientific study
that is scheduled to be completed next year.
Putting Faith to the Test
In the meantime, other scientists are taking a look at the 191 studies that
have already been done on what they call "remote healing."
One such study was conducted at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas
City, Mo. At first, Dr. William Harris had a hard time persuading a fellow
cardiologist, Dr. James O'Keefe, to participate in the prayer experiment on
heart patients.
"From a purely scientific standpoint, I thought it was illogical," says
O'Keefe. "I don't really think of spirituality normally as playing a role in
scientific, rigorous, double-blind placebo-controlled scientific studies.
It's two different realms."
A previous study by some other scientists had gotten positive results, and
Harris wanted to study remote healing for himself. But he, too, was
skeptical.
"We were even doubtful that the phenomena itself was real," he says, "that
prayer could do anything."
So Harris wanted to make his experiment impervious to any placebo effects.
He did not tell patients they were being prayed for or even that they were
part of any kind of experiment. For an entire year, about 1,000 heart
patients admitted to the institute's critical care unit were secretly
divided into two groups. Half were prayed for by a group of volunteers and
the hospital's chaplain; the other half were not.
All the patients were followed for a year, and then their health was scored
according to pre-set rules by a third party who did not know which patients
had been prayed for and which had not. The results: The patients who were
prayed for had 11 percent fewer heart attacks, strokes and life-threatening
complications.
"This study offers an interesting insight into the possibility that maybe
God is influencing our lives on Earth," says O'Keefe. "As a scientist, it's
very counterintuitive because I don't have a way to explain it."
A Miracle or Simply Chance?
Dr. Elizabeth Targ, a psychiatrist at the Pacific College of Medicine in San
Francisco, has also tested out prayer on critically ill AIDS patients.
All 20 patients in the study got pretty much the same medical treatment, but
only half of them were prayed for by spiritual healers. Ultimately, 10 of
the prayed-for patients lived, while four who had not been prayed for died.
In a larger follow-up study, Targ found that the people who received prayer
and remote healing had six times fewer hospitilizations and those
hospitalizations were significantly shorter than the people who received no
prayer and distant healing.
"I was sort of shocked," says Targ. "In a way it's like witnessing a
miracle. There was no way to understand this from my experience and from my
basic understanding of science."
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